Archive for the ‘tenggren’ Category

Around 1940, Gustaf Tenggren left the Disney Studios a changed man. It’s said that he gathered together the paintings he had created up to that point, piled them up in the street and set fire to them. With this single decisive act, he marked a turning point in his artistic career. He never painted in the classic European book illustrator style again. He had resolved himself to create a new style.

I really don’t know what brought him to that point. I’d love to know the full story. But you can clearly see the sharp dividing line between old and new in his work. In the first few years of the 1940s, Tenggren struggled to develop a new way of painting- a simplified style that depended on fundamental qualities like skillful composition, expressive texture and unique color harmonies, rather than photo-realistic detail and modeling techniques derived from classical easel painting. This book, along with its sequel Sing For America and the schoolbook reader Runaway Home would lead to the creation of the very first Little Golden Books… The Pokey Little Puppy, The Tawny Scrawny Lion and The Saggy Baggy Elephant. You know the rest of the story…

This book is far from representing Tenggren’s best work, but it’s an important example of a decisive turning point in Tenggren’s career. I’ll post some illustrations from Sing For America and Runaway Home soon.

All of us at Animation Resources wish you and yours the happiest of holidays.

Gustaf Tenggren was born in Sweden in 1896. Throughout the 1920s, he illustrated children’s books and fairy tales in a richly detailed style similar to Arthur Rackham and Kay Nielsen. In 1936, Walt Disney brought Tenggren to Hollywood to work on Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs. His designs for the Dwarfs’ cottage and the forest were directly incorporated into the film by the layout artists.

The experience of working at Disney changed Tenggren’s artistic outlook. He abandoned the European illustrator style for a simpler, more direct, stylized approach. He illustrated the most iconic Golden Books… The Poky Little Puppy, The Saggy Baggy Elephant, The Shy Little Kitten and The Tawny Scrawny Lion, and he continued to paint for Western Publishing until his death in the early sixties.

Tenggren’s Golden Books are exemplified by bold, clear compositions; a harmonious use of color and masterful rendering of a variety of textures. This book, The Little Trapper, is one of Tenggren’s least often seen titles. Published in 1950, several years before DIsney’s Davy Crockett popularized the coonskin cap, this book includes some disarmingly beautiful paintings. In particular, notice how Tenggren renders the fur. It’s a different technique every time.

Today, we digitized the illustrations from three more early books by Gustaf Tenggren. Tenggren was a key concept artist on Snow White and Pinocchio, and it’s clear that the Disney artists looked to his work for inspiration in establishing the Disney feature style.

As we scan more books, we are able to find interesting parallels. For instance, it’s interesting to compare Tenggren’s approach to Hawthorne’s “Tanglewood Tales” to Edmund Dulac’s highly stylized version.

And a similar comparison between Tenggren’s approach to a battle scene and the way Kay Nielsen handled the same subject in East of the Sun, West of the Moon.

We can also compare Tenggren’s early “Juan And Juanita” to his treatment of an almost identical subject in a totally different style in the Golden Book, “The Little Trapper”.

We can also see similarities to Tenggren’s contemporary book, “Small Fry And The Winged Horse”.

As our database fills out, more and more interesting comparisons and relationships like this will become apparent. That’s one of the most exciting things about the collection of Animation Resources. The information has always existed, but gathering it all together in one place, and making it searchable will add a level of understanding that has never been possible before. Stay tuned. It will get even better!

I would like to thank the membership of The International Animated Film Society: ASIFA-Hollywood for sponsoring my efforts to get this project off the ground during its first few years. In particular, I owe a debt of gratitude to ASIFA-Hollywood's president, Antran Manoogian. Without his unwavering support and valuable guidance this project would not exist. -Stephen Worth